2004, the Year That Changed How We Dine

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David Chang, left, at his groundbreaking Momofuku Noodle Bar, and Dan Barber’s Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, N.Y.CreditHiroko Masuike/The New York Times (left); Richard L. Harbus for The New York Times

If you want a sense of how far back New Yorkers have been obsessed with food, you can Google Delmonico’s. But to trace the way New Yorkers eat right now back to a specific watershed moment, you need to look back only a decade, to 2004.

A glance at the list of restaurants celebrating their 10th anniversaries in 2014 makes it clear that 2004, like the years 1967 and 1991 in music, or 1939 and 1999 in film, was a game-changer for the city’s restaurant scene. It was the year when two of the most expensive and exquisite tasting-menu temples in the city, Per Se and Masa, opened their gilded doors on the fourth floor of a shopping mall. It was the year when a young chef named David Chang debuted a place called Momofuku Noodle Bar and gradually (after some false starts) began wowing the throngs with bowls of ramen and slabs of pork belly on fluffy steamed buns.

Shall we go on? In 2004, the chef April Bloomfield and the music-business refugee Ken Friedman introduced New York to its first British-style gastropub, the Spotted Pig. Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Taavo Somer infused the meatpacking district and the Lower East Side, respectively, with youthful energy by opening Spice Market and Freemans. Integrity-and-ingredient-driven spots like Franny’s and Frankies 457 Court Street Spuntino promulgated the then-quirky notion that it was worth making the hegira all the way from Manhattan to Brooklyn to eat excellent food.

Dan Barber, meanwhile, was luring hungry New Yorkers into a different reverse commute. Suddenly it was not unreasonable to travel all the way up to Westchester County to experience hyper-local, farm-to-table gastronomy at its most fastidious in the warrens of Blue Hill at Stone Barns.

Oh, and Danny Meyer, the restaurateur behind Gramercy Tavern and Union Square Cafe, made the crazy decision to open a burger stand.

Before long, of course, Shake Shack would evolve into a growing national chain — and a paragon of the trend toward elevated fast food. Momofuku would turn into an international brand and Mr. Chang an empire-building star. Brooklyn’s restaurants would boom beyond anyone’s expectations, and the Spotted Pig would become “an archetype for a thousand imitations thereafter,” said Ben Leventhal, one of the founders of Eater, a food-obsessed website that he would help start a few months later, in 2005.

And at the very moment when some of the city’s legendary sanctuaries of haute cuisine began to vanish — Lutèce, La Caravelle and La Côte Basque all folded up their white tablecloths in 2004 — Per Se and Masa sidestepped the rituals of French classicism and rose up as new emblems of what fine dining in New York could be.

“It’s amazing that all those restaurants came out of 2004,” Mr. Leventhal said. “That’s fascinating. It’s a serious list.”

Indeed. But why did it happen?

The way some observers see it, 2004 was the year in which New York’s economy (and spirit) started to bloom again after a stock-market meltdown in 2000 and the terrorist attack in 2001. “It did feel exciting, and it partly felt exciting in contrast to the slowness and the quietude of the years that preceded it,” said Dana Cowin, the editor in chief of Food & Wine magazine. “Restaurants were trying to figure out what direction to take, and it was so extraordinary when 2004 came, and it turned out that it wasn’t one direction, but it was five different directions.”

Those directions may have been disparate — “it’s the seminal gastropub, it’s the seminal farm-to-table, it’s the seminal sushi restaurant,” as Ms. Cowin put it. But, she said, “most of the places that we’re talking about are unified by an appreciation of really extraordinary ingredients.” That philosophy applied to a tasting menu at Per Se or Blue Hill at Stone Barns as much as it did to what was scattered atop a pizza at Franny’s or a bowl of ramen at Momofuku Noodle Bar.

Mr. Leventhal agreed that a sense of financial and cultural uplift fostered the feeling that it was time to cut loose and try something new.

“I think restaurants felt comfortable enough with the economy that they could take some risks and have some fun,” he said. Which meant that deftly executed cooking might manifest itself in places that previously would have been dismissed as dives. “I think that Freemans and Spotted Pig and Noodle Bar really, to me, speak to a driving interest in doing something different, something refreshing and something that’s sort of invigorating,” he said. “Freemans — it’s a restaurant down an alley with a bunch of taxidermy on the wall, a restaurant that’s essentially like a ski lodge down an alley on the Lower East Side. That’s kind of radical.”

Suddenly a luxurious feast might involve sitting on a wobbly stool listening to indie rock at a pub, like the Spotted Pig. “There was so much energy that got pumped into the way we go out and the way we want to go out,” Ms. Cowin recalled.

If there was a movement taking shape, its key players admit they didn’t notice until after the fact. And many of them spent the year struggling. Mr. Chang was desperate for customers in the early days at Noodle Bar, and kicking himself for having failed to apply for a kitchen job at Per Se or Masa. “I remember thinking very clearly, ‘What am I doing?’ ” he said. “ ‘This is stupid. I should be working at Masa!’ ”

In some cases, 2004 was an outright fight. At the Spotted Pig, Mr. Friedman and Ms. Bloomfield, who had arrived from England, envisioned the vibrant boîte as “a really cool bar that happened to have food as good as any restaurant in town,” Mr. Friedman said. “Who made the rule that you can’t have a real chef instead of someone who defrosts the frozen French fries?”

But in his mind, “cool bar” signified “no reservations,” and that policy raised a few hackles as buzz began to build and some customers bristled at waiting hours for a table. “They were like: ‘What do you mean you don’t take reservations? Don’t you know who I am? I’m a real foodie, I’ve been to the French Laundry, I get into everyplace,’ ” Mr. Friedman said. “I would get into fistfights almost every night. I would kick people out and tear up their checks. April would be like: ‘Why’d you tear their check up? At least make them pay.’ ”

Even when it looks brilliant in retrospect, change is rarely easy. Back then, Mr. Barber was wondering whether hungry pilgrims were really going to make the trek up to Westchester County, while Thomas Keller remembers the twinges of angst and doubt he felt after Per Se had to be shut, one week after it had opened in the Time Warner Center, because of a fire. “I was just ready to quit,” he said. “I was like, ‘I’m going back to California.’ ”

In the end, the setback was a blessing in disguise, because it gave the Per Se team time to fine-tune a wide range of details. “It allowed us to really finish the restaurant,” Mr. Keller said. “You’re in New York City, and you think you want to give up, and then you realize that there’s just no giving up.”

New York without Per Se? Without the Spotted Pig, Spice Market or Shake Shack? Without Freemans, Frankies, Franny’s and the rest of the class of 2004? Frankly, it would be a lot less fun — and a lot less delicious.

“It was a very fine year,” Ms. Cowin said. “It really was.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: 2004, the Year That Changed How We Dine. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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